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Bark & Co acquired $15 million in Series B funding and is showing the world just how powerful dogs can be in the tech world. Driven largely by the success of the company’s BarkBox, a subscription service which delivers dog treats to the homes of members, Bark & Co. has been cash-flow positive since the fourth quarter of 2013. An inside round consisting of Vast Ventures, Bertelsmann Digital Media Investments, Slow Ventures, Daher Capital, CAA, Lerer Ventures, RRE, BoxGroup and Resolute.vc raised $10 million for the dog-driven company, while another five was financed from City National Bank. Attracting Pet Owners The Barkbox business model is built around e-commerce and online subscription plans, offering users a box of dog treats and toys each month whose contents are dependent upon the size of the dog and the subscription tier of the user. Subscriber retention is well over 90%, and 75% of users will commit to a longer-term plan after joining. Bark & Co. is also uniquely placed to cash in on rising fears among pet owners of dog treats sourced from Chinese manufacturers, as highly-publicized pet deaths attributed to Chinese treats gain more media attention. BarkBox treats and chews are sourced from areas…

Re/code journalist Ina Fried has revealed that New York’s mobile tech startup TapCommerce has just been acquired by Twitter. Founded in 2012, TapCommerce rapidly established itself as a leader in mobile ad retargeting. As any product manager familiar with the process could testify, while it’s relatively straightforward on desktop devices to help businesses target ads based on a user’s previous activity, the absence of cookies on mobile demands an altogether new approach. Desirable technology That’s where TapCommerce stepped in: according to its CEO and co-founder, Brian Long, it was able to retarget ads on mobile devices by using “large amounts of data coupled with sophisticated statistical analysis.” An ecommerce app, for instance, could be fed with retargeted ads by TapCommerce to encourage lapsed customers to come back by tempting them with new sales or promotions. The new deal with Twitter is said to be worth $100 million, although the microblogging juggernaut has so far declined to confirm the price tag. But if that’s an accurate ball park figure, you don’t need to be a seasoned product manager to figure out that TapCommerce’s platform was being eyed hungrily by the social networking giant, which has just announced new mobile app install…

Mobile advertising agencies have a new measurement tool to play with in the shape of AppsFlyer’s new offering, “AppsFlyer for Agencies.” An integrated solution for a fragmented market Anyone with media jobs in mobile advertising will know how devilishly complicated it is to measure user attribution in this fragmented market; now, New York’s AppsFlyer has a digital, last-mile solution for them. The startup’s marketing VP, Ran Avrahamy, told VentureBeat journalist John Koetsier that many agencies had been “left behind” in the brand stampede to mobile advertising, largely because of “the lack of tools to operate in this fast-growing, fragmented market.” The figures speak for themselves: fewer than half of marketers presently use agencies to help generate mobile app installs, and the chief reason is that agencies simply haven’t had the expertise at their disposal – or the tools – to produce the results. AppsFlyer’s answer? Here’s how its CEO Oren Kaniel described it in a recent press release: “AppsFlyer simplifies mobile marketing for agencies, freeing them from complex integrations and multiple SDK updates. We allow them to focus on their growth targets with the best tools designed especially for the mobile environment.” It has to be said that another big…

Tech product managers love it when the product they’re overseeing undergoes a major enhancement. This almost certainly means that tech startup Shopkick, which specializes in location-based offers, has a very happy product manager right now. The company has just announced a major new retail deal facilitated by its installation of Apple’s iBeacon technology in 100 American Eagle Outfitters stores across the US. Deals on the hoof For product managers who are only vaguely acquainted with iBeacon, it sends Bluetooth LE notifications to prospective consumers when they’ve physically stepped inside a store. Its deployment by Shopkick represents the biggest distribution to date of iBeacons for clothing sales. Encouraged with its trial of iBeacon functionality in two Macy’s stores last November, Shopkick decided to roll out the technology to another of its long-term partners, American Eagle Outfitters – the very company whose Times Square store was the launchpad for the startup’s first alerts back in 2009. The more discerning product manager will, of course, want to know exactly what Shopkick offers customers and retailers. Its original technology, which is still live, consists of a piece of proprietary hardware that retailers can use to trigger actions on potential customers’ smartphones via very high…

People holding media jobs in mobile advertising agencies have finally seen the fruits of their labor pay off. According to a new report from eMarketer featured in AdAge and several other news outlets, mobile advertising spend is on course to double by the close of 2013 to hit $9.6 billion (it was $4.4 billion in 2012, so to be accurate the 2013 spend is actually more than double). On the rise at last And it doesn’t stop there: the report forecasts that mobile advertising spending will leap again by a further $5 billion next year. After limping at an underwhelming rate for so long, despite endless promises of a stubbornly elusive breakthrough, mobile advertising finally appears to be taking off. By comparison, the report reveals that desktop ad spend grew by a feeble 1.7 percent in 2013. Overall, the digital ad spend will have grown by 15.7 percent by end of year – and mobile is clearly at the head of the pack. Anyone with experience of media jobs in that corner of Adland known as mobile can tell you why: the uptake of mobile devices has not only been soaring, but people are spending more time on them, too….